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Israeli
scientists grow palm from 2,000-year-old seed at Masada
Israeli scientists have succeeded in getting a
2,000-year-old date seed to sprout and grow into a palm of a native type that
had been extinct for hundreds of years.
The seed - nicknamed Methusaleh after the oldest person in
the Bible -was found in the ancient fortress of Masada, on a hilltop in the
Judean desert by the Dead Sea where Jewish zealots committed mass suicide to
avoid surrender to the Romans in the first century CE.
Project manager Sarah Sallon hopes the palm will prove to be
a fruit-bearing female, but that she will know only in a few years time, when
the now more than 1.20-metre-tall sprout grows into a palm tree.
If another of the seeds found at Masada can be cultivated
and proves to be male, the two trees will be able to reproduce.
Israel, which now grows only imported date species originating
from countries like Morocco, Egypt and Iraq, would be able to cultivate its own
native kind: the Judean date palm, or Phoenix dactylifera in Latin, hundreds of
years after it died out.
It is no surprise therefore that Sallon sounds excited. According
to the first-century Roman author, zoologist and botanist Pliny the Elder,
"huge" forests of date palms stretched in his time from the Sea of
Galilee in what is now northern Israel to the Dead Sea in the south, she
explains.
Pliny, she adds, described the Judean dates as delicious and
especially large. They were also said to have medicinal properties, used
against "spitting blood" - probably meaning tuberculosis - and
stomach problems, including diarrhea. Sallon, who runs a natural medicine research
centre at Jerusalem's Hadassah hospital, wants to study those medicinal
properties.
But after the Romans conquered the region in the first
century CE and as a result of other invasions, the date palm forests, which she
explains need careful and continuous cultivation, gradually died out.
By the Crusader period, or the late Middle Ages,
"almost nothing was left of those plantations," Sallon explains.
"Date trees are like children. You have to look after
them," she says, explaining that the Babylonians discovered 5,000 years
ago how to spur pollination by manually bringing the male pollen to the female,
by physically climbing the trees.
The British-born Israeli and her co-worker, plant specialist
Elaine Solowey, planted Methuselah and two other date seeds found at the same
location in January 2005. Only Methuselah began sprouting.
The seeds were found at Masada during the 1963-65 excavations
of the fortress built in the first century BC by Jewish Roman King Herod the
Great.
They were stored at room temperature for four decades by the
keepers of the artifacts collection of world-renowned Israeli archeologist -
and former army chief of staff - Yigael Yadin, who had led the excavations at
Masada.
"In 2005 I went, and begged them to give me some
seeds," says Sallon.
She believes the high summer temperatures and low
precipitation at Masada may have contributed to the seeds' exceptional longevity,
by minimizing the creation of free radicals.
Sallon and her co-workers sent two other date seeds found at
Masada as well as fragments of the seed to the University of Zurich for
radiocarbon dating, which found that they were 2,000 years old. The carbon
dating also matched the historic dating of when Masada functioned as a pleasure
palace for King Herod.
"To date, the oldest seed to grow into a plant was
1,300 years old and that of a lotus - found in a dried-up lake in China and
cultivated at the University of California," says Sallon.
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